William Guarnere

William J. "Wild Bill" Guarnere (28 April 1923-8 March 2014) was a US Army Staff Sergeant who served in Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, US 506th Infantry Regiment during World War II.

Biography
William J. Guarnere was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 28 April 1923, the youngest of ten children born to an Italian family. He worked for Baldwin Locomotive Works, building M4 Sherman tanks for the US Army, and he enlisted in the US Army airborne infantry on 31 August 1942, training at Camp Toccoa, Georgia. Guarnere lost his brother Henry at Monte Cassino in 1944, leading to him showing ferocity against the Germans in battle; he gained the nickname "Wild Bill". On 6 June 1944, during Operation Overlord, he ignored orders from Lieutenant Richard Winters to wait for his order to fire on a German supply platoon and gunned most of them down himself, worried that the "Quaker" Winters had an aversion to killing, and dreaming of vengeance. He was wounded by shrapnel in the Netherlands in October 1944, and he was sent to a hospital in England; he was court-martialled and demoted to private for attempting to leave the hospital with concealed wounds to rejoin his company. On 16 December 1944, after rejoining his company, he lost his right leg to a German artillery barrage near Foy, Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, and he secured full disability from the army after the war. He died in Philadelphia in 2014 at the age of 90.